The Maid

In the opening scene of this Chilean drama, a middle-class family throws an after-dinner birthday party for the live-in maid, who's been with the family for 20 years and just turned 41. She's one of them, the family members insist, but as friction builds between the stout, stone-faced woman and the two eldest children, now teenagers beginning to assert themselves, her limits inside the home become all too clear. Further threatened when the mother decides to hire a second domestic, the maid conspires against a series of unwanted partners, locking them out of the house and framing them for various mishaps. As played by Catalina Saavedra, she's a guarded, ruthless, but ultimately poignant character, and writer-director Sebastian Silva studies the levers of power inside the little household as if it were the Politburo. In Spanish with subtitles.
ByJ.R. Jones